Thread

I have this idea where people sign up on my restaurants listings web site and get sms messages on the “dish of the day” from the restaurateurs who manage their listing on the web site.

Unfortunately, in the country where I am the mobile internet is maybe 2 years away to be a force. Everybody has a mobile phone and the idea is to have restaurants sms their clients (via the website) the dish of the day that corresponds with their favourite type of dish. Or just a notice to advise them something new has been put on the menu.

Anybody have any ideas?

TIA

It can be done on Joomla: http://www.sms-integration.com/p_133-joomla-sms-sms.html

I am sure there are pure-PHP solutions, too, which it wouldn’t be too hard to port over to use with EE. That said, I am not aware of a native module.

I’ve used the MobileStorm API with ExpressionEngine a bit, and would be happy to make an add-on to facilitate this sort of thing. Unfortunately the problem right now is that there isn’t a unified/standard API for SMS (that I know of), so each SMS service company has different API calls and it would be cumbersome to try to integrate all of them. So this is the kind of thing that may be better done on a case-by-case basis.

I believe the most simple setup is to use a SMS operator which accepts SMS messages through e-mail. That way, you only have to send a regular mail to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), and put your SMS text in the body of the mail.

So if a restaurant wants to SMS people with the dish of the day, they fill in a form on your site with the details, and you send this out through mail to the SMS operator.

I’ve used the MobileStorm API with ExpressionEngine a bit, and would be happy to make an add-on to facilitate this sort of thing. Unfortunately the problem right now is that there isn’t a unified/standard API for SMS (that I know of), so each SMS service company has different API calls and it would be cumbersome to try to integrate all of them. So this is the kind of thing that may be better done on a case-by-case basis.

Thank you for your reply! I was hoping somebody had done something like this before.

Have you, or are you able to, set something up where the service is provided for members with paid accounts. That is, they need to have an “account” with credits (which they pay for prior to using the service) to be able to send SMS messages? The idea is to have customers subscribe to their favourite restaurant for receiving text messages. The restaurants broadcasts by sending text messages when they have a special dish of the day. (Where I am located, we eat a lot of fresh fish. But some fish are not available on demand and can only be supplied by the catch some fishermen are lucky to get. And then the restaurants need to sell them as quickly as possible so as not to store them or throw them away.)

No, I’m afraid I haven’t had SMS messages sent where they require an account inside of ExpressionEngine, but it wouldn’t be hard to do so with a little plug-in.